Why You?: Selling Yourself
Derek K. Jones1
1CUBRIC, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom

Synopsis

This second presentation in the 'Money, Money, Money' session will focus on 'selling yourself', including what and what not to include in your CV and how you can enhance your visibility and reputation. One theme is "Every Little Helps", and we'll discuss what you can do to enhance your CV. Another theme is "It's a Small World", emphasizing that the academic community is a small and tight-knit community, and so advice will be given both on exploiting this fact and some things to watch out for. Finally, we'll talk about the right way to respond to a grant rejection.

OVERVIEW

In this talk, we'll review the "Do's and Don'ts" of promoting yourself. While some time will be given to a discussion of your CV and applying for grants, we'll also consider how to promote yourself to future employers, and what you can do 'beyond the CV' to enhance your chances of success. This includes stategies to develop your 'esteem indicators', promote your work on social media, and ways of 'packaging' your work / application / presentation. For some funding schemes / job applications, you'll be asked to interview or make a presentation. This is another chance to promote and 'sell' yourself, and so advice will be given here too. Finally, I'll suggest some key questions that you should be able to answer in any interview situation. Giving good, strong answers to these will not only help you to convince the funder that your project is worth supporting, but a confident response will help in promoting yourself as the person to lead the research.

Acknowledgements

Derek Jones is supported by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award (096646/Z/11/Z) and a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award (104943/Z/14/Z)

References

  • YouTube video on starting a speech: https://bit.ly/HowToStartSpeech
  • BlogPost on Academic Twitter: https://bit.ly/Academic-Twitter
  • Book: "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B Cialdini. (e.g. http://bit.ly/Influence-Persuasion)

Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 29 (2021)